If you’re feeling confused about the state of startup investing, join the club. Public company shares have been relentlessly hammered in recent months amid rising fears of a recession, yet startup funding seems as brisk as ever and, more surprising, to us, VCs are still routinely announcing enormous new funds as they have for many years. To better understand what’s going on, we talked this week with Index Ventures cofounder Danny Rimer, who grew up in Geneva, where Index has an office, but ...read more

The tech giant states that its OCI Dedicated Region enables enterprises to gain the full functionality of Oracle’s public cloud in the locations of their choice, including their own data centers. Our aim is to provide a plug-and-play public cloud experience, on a pay-as-you-use model that allows customers to innovate faster, reduce time-to-market and stay agile, says Srikanth Doranadula, VP- Hybrid Cloud Systems, Oracle India. End-user spending on public cloud services in India is expec ...read more

Before the robots arrived, surgical training was done the same way for nearly a century. During routine surgeries, trainees worked with nurses, anesthesiologists, and scrub technicians to position and sedate the patient, while also preparing the surgical field with instruments and lights. In many cases, the trainee then made the incision, cauterized blood vessels to prevent blood loss, and positioned clamps to expose the organ or area of interest. That’s often when the surgeon arrived, scr ...read more

(Bigstock Photo) It’s getting harder for an early-stage company to find a buyer.  The exit value for U.S. venture capital-backed startups in the second quarter was the lowest it’s been in more than five years, according to a report released Wednesday by PitchBook. After an already slow first quarter, analysts estimate there were just 831 total exits through the first half of the year, representing $49 billion in exit value. In 2021, there were 883 deals worth $372.2 billion during th ...read more

Editor's take: Drastic times call for drastic measures. Facebook has seen user engagement slow in recent quarters, and competition from rival social platforms like TikTok is only expected to get more intense. If Facebook can stave off irrelevance at the expense of some longstanding policies, then so be it. Meta will soon allow select Facebook users to have up to five profiles tied to a single account. As part of an upcoming test, some users will be allowed to create up to four additional prof ...read more

Why it matters: Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) announced the completion of the Bungie acquisition on Friday, officially making them part of the gaming industry's great shakeup. Originally announced in January, the $3.6 billion acquisition gives Sony complete access to Bungie's resources, player base, and their already established ability to support multiple gaming platforms. Despite the acquisition, Bungie says they will retain creative license and continue designing and publishing their ...read more

In brief: Amazon's Prime Day is over, but one deal still available right now is a historically low price on a quad-core Comet Lake. Other budget processors, including more recent Core i3s, also still have good prices, presenting an opportunity for anyone planning to build a low-cost PC this year. Intel's Core i3-10100 is TechSpot's best budget CPU for 2022, and Amazon currently offers its F variant at a lowest-ever $68 – 30 percent off its $100 MSRP. This model doesn't feature integrated gr ...read more

In 2016, we wrote about Cargo Sous Terrain, a (then) US $3.4 billion concept for underground cargo tubes full of automated delivery carts whisking goods between cities and logistics centers across Switzerland at 30 kilometers per hour. The idea behind CST is to provide for long-term freight transport without relying on expansion of road and rail networks, which are already stuffed with both freight and passengers and don’t have much room to grow. Like so many concepts of this kind, six ye ...read more

Amazon will build out the shell and core of the planned 43-story Tower 1 at Bellevue 600, depicted at left in this architectural rendering, before pausing construction. It will wait to start construction on the 31-story Tower 2, at right.  (NBBJ Rendering) Citing ongoing uncertainty about the impact of hybrid work on its office designs, Amazon says it will pause construction on five towers in downtown Bellevue, Wash., and hold off, for now, on construction of a sixth new tower in the city. ...read more

The big picture: As the crypto crash continues to leave Bitcoin prices depressed compared to their position a year ago, knock-on effects are still playing out in various areas. One of those is the production cost, and miners' efforts to control it may be a double-edged sword for the crypto market. JPMorgan Chase Co. reports that the cost of mining Bitcoin has fallen to around $13,000 from $24,000 since early June. Bloomberg notes that the drop is likely an effect of the crypto winter, but it' ...read more